The Law of Parity Conservation and Other Symmetry Laws of Physics

C H E N N I N G Y A N G The law of parity conservation and other symmetry laws of physics Nobel Lecture, December 11, 1957 It is a pleasure and a great privilege to have this opportunity to discuss with you the question of parity conservation and other symmetry laws. We shall be concerned first with the general aspects of the role of the symmetry laws in physics; second, with the development that led to the disproof of parity conservation; and last, with a discussion of some other symmetry laws which physicists have learned through experience, but which do not yet together form an integral and conceptually simple pattern. The interesting and very exciting developments since parity conservation was disproved, will be cov- ered by Dr. Lee in his lecture 1. I The existence of symmetry laws is in full accordance with our daily experience. The simplest of these symmetries, the isotropy and homogeneity of space, are concepts that date back to the early history of human thought. The invariance of physical laws under a coordinate transformation of uni- form velocity, also known as the invariance under Galilean transformations, is a more sophisticated symmetry that was early recognized, and formed one of the corner-stones of Newtonian mechanics. Consequences of these symmetry principles were greatly exploited by physicists of the past centuries and gave rise to many important results. A good example in this direction is the theorem that in an isotropic solid there are only two elastic constants. Another type of consequences of the symmetry laws relates to the conservation laws. It is common knowledge today that in general a symmetry principle (or equivalently an invariance principle) generates a conservation law. For example, the invariance of physical laws under space displacement has as a consequence the conservation of momentum, the invariance under space rotation has as a consequence the conservation of angular momentum. While the importance of these conservation laws was fully understood, their close relationship with the symmetry laws seemed not to have been clearly recognized until the beginning of the twentieth century 2. (Cf. Fig. 1.) 394 1957 C.N.YANG Fig. 1 . With the advent of special and general relativity, the symmetry laws gained new importance. Their connection with the dynamic laws of physics takes on a much more integrated and interdependent relationship than in classical mechanics, where logically the symmetry laws were only consequences of the dynamical laws that by chance possess the symmetries. Also in the relativity theories the realm of the symmetry laws was greatly en- riched to include invariances that were by no means apparent from daily experience. Their validity rather was deduced from, or was later confirmed by complicated experimentation. Let me emphasize that the conceptual sim- plicity and intrinsic beauty of the symmetries that so evolve from complex experiments are for the physicists great sources of encouragement. One learns to hope that Nature possesses an order that one may aspire to comprehend. It was, however, not until the development of quantum mechanics that the use of the symmetry principles began to permeate into the very language of physics. The quantum numbers that designate the states of a system are often identical with those that represent the symmetries of the system. It in- deed is scarcely possible to overemphasize the role played by the symmetry principles in quantum mechanics. To quote two examples: The general struc- ture of the Periodic Table is essentially a direct consequence of the isotropy of Coulomb’s law. The existence of the antiparticles - namely the positron, the antiproton, and the antineutron - were theoretically anticipated as consequences of the symmetry of physical laws with respect to Lorentz transformations. In both cases Nature seems to take advantage of the simple mathematical representations of the symmetry laws. When one pauses to consider the elegance and the beautiful perfection of the mathematical rea- soning involved and contrast it with the complex and far-reaching physical PARITY CONSERVATION AND OTHER SYMMETRY LAWS 395 consequences, a deep sense of respect for the power of the symmetry laws never fails to develop. One of the symmetry principles, the symmetry between the left and the right, is as old as human civilization. The question whether Nature exhibits such symmetry was debated at length by philosophers of the pasts. Of course, in daily life, left and right are quite distinct from each other. Our hearts, for example, are on our left sides. The language that people use both in the orient and the occident, carries even a connotation that right is good and left is evil. However, the laws of physics have always shown complete symmetry between the left and the right, the asymmetry in daily life being attributed to the accidental asymmetry of the environment, or initial conditions in organic life. To illustrate the point, we mention that if there existed a mirror- image man with his heart on his right side, his internal organs reversed com- pared to ours, and in fact his body molecules, for example sugar molecules, the mirror image of ours, and if he ate the mirror image of the food that we eat, then according to the laws of physics, he should function as well as we do. The law of right-left symmetry was used in classical physics, but was not of any great practical importance there. One reason for this derives from the fact that right-left symmetry is a discrete symmetry, unlike rotational symmetry which is continuous. Whereas the continuous symmetries always lead to conservation laws in classical mechanics, a discrete symmetry does not. With the introduction of quantum mechanics, however, this difference between the discrete and continuous symmetries disappears. The law of right-left symmetry then leads also to a conservation law: the conservation of parity. The discovery of this conservation law dates back to 1924 when Laporte 4 found that energy levels in complex atoms can be classified into « gestriche- ne » and « ungestrichene » types, or in more recent language, even and odd levels. In transitions between these levels during which one photon is emitted or absorbed, Laporte found that the level always changes from even to odd or vice versa. Anticipating later developments, we remark that the evenness or oddness of the levels was later referred to as the parity of the levels. Even levels are defined to have parity +1, odd levels parity -1 . One also defines the photon emitted or absorbed in the usual atomic transitions to have odd parity. Laporte’s rule can then be formulated as the statement that in an atomic transition with the emission of a photon, the parity of the initial state is equal to the total parity of the final state, i.e. the product of the parities of the final atomic state and the photon emitted. In other words, parity is conserved, or unchanged, in the transition. 396 1957 C. N. YANG In 1927 Wigners took the critical and profound step to prove that the empirical rule of Laporte is a consequence of the reflection invariance, or right-left symmetry, of the electromagnetic forces in the atom. This fun- damental idea was rapidly absorbed into the language of physics. Since right- left symmetry was unquestioned also in other interactions, the idea was fur- ther taken over into new domains as the subject matter of physics extended into nuclear reactions, mesoninteractions, and strange-particle physics. One became accustomed to the idea of nuclear parities as well as atomic parities, and one discusses and measures the intrinsic parities of the mesons. Throughout these developments the concept of parity and the law of parity conservation proved to be extremely fruitful, and the success had in turn been taken as a support for the validity of right-left symmetry. II Against such a background the so-called puzzle developed in the last few years. Before explaining the meaning of this puzzle it is best to go a little bit into a classification of the forces that act between subatomic particles, a classification which the physicists have learned through experience to use in the last 50 years. We list the four classes of interactions below. The strength of these interactions is indicated in the column on the right. The strongest interactions are the nuclear interactions which include the forces that bind nuclei together and the interaction between the nuclei and the mesons. It also includes the interactions that give rise to the observed strange-particle production. The second class of interactions are the electromagnetic interactions of which physicists know a great deal. In fact, the crowning achievement of the physicists of the 19th century was a detailed understanding of the electromagnetic forces. With the advent of quantum mechanics, this understanding of electromagnetic forces gives in principle an accurate, integral and detailed description of practically all the physical and chemical phenomena of our daily experience. The third class of forces, the weak interactions, was first discovered around the beginning of PARITY CONSERVATION AND OTHER SYMMETRY LAWS 397 this century in the β-radioactivity of nuclei, a phenomena which especially in the last 25 years has been extensively studied experimentally. With the discovery of decays and µ capture it was noticed independently 6 by Klein, by Tiomno and Wheeler, and by Lee, Rosenbluth and me, that these interactions have roughly the same strengths as β-interactions. They are called weak interactions, and in the last few years their rank has been con- stantly added to through the discovery of many other weak interactions responsible for the decay of the strange particles.

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